By now you’ve probably heard designers throwing around the terms “progressive enhancement” and “graceful degradation” when discussing their web designs. I’ve come to realize that most designers and even some developers are misusing these terms. They are using them as excuses for designs that never tried to be universally accessible. I’ve begun to call this style of design what it really is: progressive degradation.
Progressive enhancement wouldn’t be possible if you started from the best-case scenario of your design. You’d have nothing to enhance! So the term itself implies the process: Start with your content and information architecture and implement a design that is accessible to everyone. You should be able to launch the website at this stage and be proud of it. Once you’ve achieved that, you can apply layers of “wow” to the site that take advantage of the newest technologies and most capable browsers. It’s a sensible way to design and it’s also the most sensible way to develop.
Graceful degradation is not a design strategy, it’s a functional necessity, and it is not simply the reverse path of progressive enhancement. Graceful degradation is about not failing the edge-case user. It’s the worst-case scenario you have to provide for, whether you like it or not. If progressive enhancement is the icing on the cake, graceful degradation is the cake itself.
Progressive enhancement can go much farther than cosmetics. Ajax is a great example of progressive enhancement. Instant validation of forms, loading content without having to reload a page and responsive interactivity are all enhancements for the lucky users who can get them. But to qualify as progressive enhancement these features have to be treated like extras, not the default state. If you’re a designer, here’s an easy way to keep this straight in your mind. Imagine your client is visiting the website you designed in a browser that doesn’t support the “enhancements”. Would you still be proud of your work? If you really followed the principles of progressive enhancement and graceful degradation you would have no trouble answering “yes” to that question.
On the other hand, if you would be embarrassed to show anyone the dumbed-down version of your website, then you’ve probably used what I call “progressive degradation”. Progressive degradation is all the ways your design fell apart as it moved from the design phase through development and finally to the browsers. It’s what you get when you try to play progressive enhancement backward instead of forward or when you care more about the coolness of the design than about reality. Unfortunately, reality always wins in the end.